Coincidence or a cunning plot? Two new Sherlock Holmes stories premiere within days of one another. Both connect Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective with the present day. Both explore ideas around the manipulation of truth.
Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Fiend is a new, reality-disrupting “comedy adventure” by Toby Hulse and Ross Smith. It’s 1888. Women are being horribly murdered in London’s Whitechapel district. The cast, speaking as a chorus, introduce the action: the press have labelled the unknown killer “a monster” and so transformed an individual into an object of lurid speculation – one that boosts newspaper sales. By analogy with the adage “it takes a thief to catch a thief”, they tell us, a fiction is called upon to catch this fiction: this is a case for Sherlock Holmes.
